“As a kid, I yearned for the mines.” 

I guess Jack Black—I refuse to refer to him as Steve—didn’t learn about the Industrial Revolution in school. But in a town where your only career paths seem to be working at a potato chip farm or trying to get on the show, “Storage Wars,” you can’t really blame him for wanting to fill his airways with noxious coal dust because even lung cancer would be better than becoming whatever the fuck kind of character Jason Momoa plays in this “film.” 

Luckily for our tenacious little child laborer, he eventually achieves his dream and mines up a “thing” which he combines with another “thing” (his words, not mine) and shit, sham, sha-bam, he’s in Minecraft now! I mean, if it were that easy, I wouldn’t be paying eight bucks a month to host a server that crashes every time I activate my ghast factory. And similarly to the thousands of ghasts that I waterboard daily, watching this movie has left me with nothing more than chests full of tears—and they ain’t tears of joy. 

Now, I could go on and on about how the plot of this film is weaker than three malnourished British children pushing a cart full of rubble through a dimly lit shaft, but that would be like grabbing a creeper’s balls and complaining when they explode. If the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to give us anything more than a get-the-MacGuffin hero’s journey with shoehorned character moments and a dead mom, I don’t think I can be bothered to give a slime’s ass. 

The only character who had anything remotely resembling an arc was Gary the Garbage Guy, or whatever the fuck his name was, who went from being a washed-up Billy Mitchell parody to a washed-up Billy Mitchell parody with four friends, two of them children. If there’s one thing I learned from him, it’s that the Gollum movie is probably going to suck because you can only really pity somebody so much. But the real issue with this film lies beyond the shoddy storyline, flat performances, and Quantumania-esque visuals—and yes, not Spy Kids, Quantumania. Good job, Marvel! The real issue with this film is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Minecraft is about. 

You can shove your art in a shulker chest and bury it down at a y level of -64 because these movies are about attracting brand awareness, and nothing more. The filmmakers want you to believe that Minecraft exists solely in creative mode like some sort of big, digital lego, but that’s like saying there’s nothing in the nether except lava and zombie pigmen. You lose out on the crimson forests, the bastion remnants, and the hordes of hoglins chasing your ass. Sure, you can be creative if you want, but that’s just a piece of the cake. When I play Minecraft, I’m straight up doing foul things.   

Have you ever griefed a world? There’s really nothing quite like destroying the fruits of a twelve-year-old child’s labor, chopping down the tree, and pissing on the soil where it used to grow. But when I watched “A Minecraft Movie,” it was like they were comparing me to those pesky piglin assholes and their evil sorceress emperess. It was like I was the bad guy! I mean, I’m the fucking adult here! Who do you think is dishing out the dough for the enderman backpacks and those 3D t-shirts that look like Steve is breaking out of them? These little brats that can’t even keep their goddamn traps shut long enough for me to make it to the end of the movie without at least five Karens threatening to “call the cops?” 

But the biggest, and I mean biggest, insult of them all is that watching this movie was like listening to my senile grandma explain Minecraft to me. Like, you can’t plop a pair of boots on some iron blocks and spawn whatever sort of Captain America-looking abomination fought in the film’s climax. You can’t evade vindicators in a woodland mansion by whipping out your fucking Sax-a-Boom, Jack. And for fucks sake! Jablinski’s third house is built entirely out of wool? Pink wool? 

Come on! Do you have any idea how rare pink sheep mobs are? We’re talking a 0.164% spawn rate here and figuring that Jack’s house is approximately 284 blocks, excluding the door and windows, and that you get one block of wool from each sheep sheared or killed—he definitely didn’t have looting at this point in the game—it would’ve taken him like 17,324 Minecraft days to find all those sheep. Sure, he could have found a couple and bred them or used dyes, but for a guy who thought building a wool house was a good idea, I doubt these were thoughts that crossed his mind.   

This film is simply littered with blockheaded inaccuracies, so much so that they might have well called it “A Cube Creator Movie.” That being said, I always try to look at the positives, and one thing I can say was genuinely great here was the chemistry between Jack Black and Jason Momoa. Honestly, I was waiting for little hearts to appear around their heads and for a little Black-Momoa hybrid to pop out of the void. And I’m not gonna lie, I had to adjust myself in my pants after that steamy elytra flight sequence when they formed an upside-down man sandwich and our favorite miner 69er couldn’t help himself but grab a hearty slab of Aquaman ass.

In all, I’m giving this one three-and-a-half mooshrooms out of ten, which I think is a pretty generous score. There are visuals to see, actors to recognize, and a fun little diddy Jack sings about roasting chickens alive in lava that’s sure to impart good lessons about animal rights onto tomorrow’s youth. So, if you’re the kind of person who did the whole “have kids” thing and needs something to do with the fam this weekend, then sure, give it a go. On the other hand, if you value your time and money, you’d be better off just playing the actual game and saying, “Skadoosh,” every so often.